The Wolf Among Us, From The Outside – Part II

Back in October, when the first episode of Telltale Games’ new series The Wolf Among Us debuted, I thought I’d try something different. Rather than play it alone, like I did with The Walking Dead, I got my wife to give it a shot. She doesn’t play games, but I thought she might enjoy this one. I wrote about her experience with the first episode here, and now it’s time for our post-Episode 2 recap.

As before, there are spoilers ahead. I’ll be talking about the plot and other game details.

A lot went on in the first episode, regardless of whether you’re an avid gamer. You met the game’s protagonist, Bigby Wolf, and learned about the bizarre world that he inhabits. My wife got to process the concept of fairy-tale characters slumming it in New York while also wrapping her mind around an unfamiliar controller and a completely foreign style of game. She did a great job.

She voiced her concerns about whether or not her decisions would ultimately matter, but it seemed like we would be heading into the second episode with a nice bit of momentum. Now that she’s done with the follow-up, it looks like that energy is just about exhausted.

“Episode two lost some of it’s novelty, so maybe it was a little more boring,” she said afterward. “It just didn’t feel as though as much happened in the episode at all. It felt shorter, and it felt like less stuff happened. It didn’t end on a noteworthy cliffhanger – oh, Crane looks bad, what a shock.”

I don’t think the four-month waiting time between installments did the game any favors, either. When we started the game, it took a while for everything to click back into our memories – even as the “Previously on The Wolf Among Us,” thing whirred onto the screen in awkwardly segmented chunks. (Side note: If you’re playing on the 360, I feel your pain. These loading times are an embarrassment, though it gave my wife time to check messages on her phone.)

In the first episode, she let the Woodsman go, so Bigby ended up interrogating Tweedle Dee. She was curious to see how her choices affected future episodes, and I pointed this out as one example.

“I think it’s interesting, but even if you’re interrogating someone else do you still end up in room 207?” she asked. “I would think that one of the benefits of a game like this would be that you could go back and make different choices and have completely different outcomes, but it doesn’t seem like this is the case. I could be totally wrong, though.”